Brahma's atheist

If the gods existed and the world was the way it is now would you worship one or all of them?
The way I see it is like a child loving an abusive parent(in most cases a father ).By that I mean the parent beats the child and allows others to beat it yet the child still adores the parent. It manages to dismiss the atrocities by saying it deserved it for some wrongdoing or even worse its love was being tested. Or it simply glosses over the event.

Blu

I assume you are referring to the common atheist belief that God or religion is the cause of all suffering such as the suffering due to war and terrorism. First of all, if you are an atheist the argument must be directed toward those who believe in God because an atheist wouldn't even claim God did anything at all.

Human beings are responsible for everything that takes place on earth, not God. We can get into the "Free will" argument but I prefer not to at this point.

Most people (religious) know that we are responsible for all our choices as a society and as governments. I find that a lot of atheists try to explain their beliefs and others have "arguments" with Believers by stating that God is the cause of suffering or (in your words) the abuse of His children.

So everything that takes place in the physical dimension related to human choices is Human based, not God based. Atrocities are human created and atrocities (murder etc) are performed by human action, by human hands. It is a common belief (religious) that God does not control the minds and bodies of human beings so where does God come into this?

Do you believe that God controls the minds and bodies of people? Do you believe religious people are being controled by God?

Autonemesis

Since I don't believe in any god, no.

But the god idea sets the stage for unsupportable rationales, like 9/11 is Allah's will, showing his displeasure with the infidels. I don't recall any atheists flying airplanes into buildings for the glory of Darwin.

Garbage in, garbage out. Religion is a gigantic source of garbage input. It's no wonder that so much garbage issues from it.

Laurentius

AVE


If the gods existed and the world was the way it is now would you worship one or all of them?


If gods existed, and especially if the Biblical God existed, then the world would make less to me than it does now. Most of the time I'd abhore the God that had the idea of maintaining such an imprefect world. And from time to time I'd feel like I were a stupid clown.

AVE

Philosoft

I don't know your specific religious beliefs, but much of Christian doctrine holds, nay requires, that we are sinful by nature. If this is so, how do you maintain that we are responsible for the individual actions that are direct manifestations of our God-given natures? I'd really like to see you try to defend the notion that God isn't responsible for our sinful natures.

Blu

Hello Philosoft,

I was half hoping you would respond to this.

As for my belief, I like to call myself a Universalist. I have my personal, relative truth which I use to examine and to live the events of my life like everyone else on this earth.

I really can't argue that God isn't or is the source of our "so-called" God given natures. So the argument that God is or isn't the source of our "sinful natures" is an argument that is redundant at best. We would have to get mixed up in theories, relative truths etc. to even come close with muddling with this question which will never be answered by anyone of our limited human species.

It is not even helpful to accuse God or religion of being the source of anything negative, it just creates more negativity and hate. People work very very hard to accuse and they do very little to help the situation. In other words, people like to point fingers more than they like to actually lift a finger to help someone who is in an oppressive or abusive situation. I still stand by my belief that people need to take responsibility for what they create because that is the only way to begin to change. Pointing fingers has never... and will never be the answer to any of humanities problems.

It is not even a valid way to "preach" to non-atheists why their Gods are so horrible and to explain why they (atheists) personally don't believe in God.

A3

Hi Philosoft,

What makes you think we are not? If you think you are master of your own castle with no responsibility towards anyone else, what is your motive for anything good you do? Please specify what you see as good.

We have indeed God-given natures, and the freedom how to use them. Would you hold a gift-giver responsible for how the gift is (ab)used?
If I killed your neighbor because I am convinced you wanted it, would that make you responsible???

You know evil exists, (just read the papers) but God did not create evil, humans did. So....
I'd really like to see you try to defend the notion that God is responsible for our sinful natures.

Regards
Adriaan

Bill Snedden

P1) God created all that exists (except Himself, of course)
P2) Evil exists
C1) God created evil

P1 & P2 would seem unassailable under orthodox Christian Theology. C1 follows by modus ponens. Seems sound to me.

P1 might be attacked by arguing that God only created the initial state of the universe (in which evil did not exist), and that Lucifer's rebellion against God and the subsequent Fall were the introduction of evil into the universe and the world, respectively.

Unfortunately, this attack fails because even if sound, it would still be true that God created all the necessary antecedent conditions under which evil could come into existence and therefore is directly responsible for allowing evil the possibility of existence. Moreover, in orthodox Christian theology, God is assumed to have perfect foreknowledge of future events. If so, He would of necessity have perfectly foreseen the consequences of allowing the potential for evil to exist and must therefore have chosen to allow the potential with full knowledge that it would become reality. In such a case, there is no qualitative difference between actively creating evil and passively allowing it to come into existence; both are equally culpable.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

P.S. As interesting as this topic is, I don't think it belongs in this forum, so I'm going to move it to Miscellaneous Religion Discussions.

[ July 01, 2002: Message edited by: Bill Snedden ]</p>

Pensee

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Can I use that line?

I've been using <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> a lot in the past few days. It's starting to lose it's specialness.

Autonemesis

I've been using the Glory of Darwin line for a few days, it's losing it's specialness too. But sure, go ahead and use it.